PSC Member Nomination

[Daniel Morissette]

Hi Howard,

I think your reasoning is good too... more people to share the load 
should help in theory... but since you ask:

Howard Butler wrote:
> 
> Why would 14 be a bit much?  Do you fear it would dilute the power of an 
> individual PSC member?  Would a committee that big be unwieldy to manage?
> 

Mostly because as the committee gets larger, the individual members tend 
to feel much less responsibility and tend to be less active... that's my 
experience with larger groups anyway. In other words, it's not diluting 
the power of a single individual PSC member that worries me, it's 
diluting the committee itself, its responsiveness, and the commitment of 
the members to the decisions and their consequences.

The MapServer PSC is not doing too bad so far. The level of 
participation is fairly good and we tend to get over 50% participation 
on most RFCs. I doubt we'll be able to maintain that level of commitment 
if we double the size of the PSC tomorrow.

Take for instance OSGeo's System Admin Committee, it has 9 members and 
it's hard to collect more than 3 votes on anything... and it's almost 
always yourself and Frank who end up doing all the work. Why? Because 
each member was added for good reasons at one point, but very few of 
them have time for or feel a real commitment to SAC's mission (I know 
because I'm one of those sitting on SAC but contributing very little).

I don't want MapServer's PSC to become like SAC. Bring 7 committed 
individuals who have some time available and are going to contribute 
something (anything that helps the project, not just code) and I'll be 
first to support bumping the committee to 14. In the meantime I'm +0.

BTW, this is just my opinion based on past experience with larger 
groups... and as I wrote above I think your reasoning is good too... the 
beauty of a committee is that if everyone else wants 14 members then the 
majority wins (and I won't object).

Daniel
-- 
Daniel Morissette
http://www.mapgears.com/